Frankenblog . . . is another portmanteau

tophat1’s Technology and the Future post got me thinking (as did the fact that I was tophat1’s discussion partner, which is why this is a blog post and not a comment)... One of Ong's basic points is that writing is a technology. So it is subject to the same good-or-bad evaluations that might be made about our newer, shinier, electronic technology. Accordingly, there is a fair amount of heady stuff written by important people (Ong mentions Plato, Rousseau and Derrida, among others) about whether writing is a good technology or a bad one. Writing gets credit from Ong, at the very least, for having "transformed human consciousness" (77). Which seems like a pretty cool thing for it to have done. But Plato, Rousseau & co. are still full of complaints about the technology. They relate it to things like falsehood, absence and death, and deem it inferior, or at least secondary, to speech. Derrida comes to writing's defense, in a way, but he’s not going to help anyone argue that the technology's not problematic (really... follow the link). So if the written word is dead and absent in some essential, important way, is the blogosphere's self-motivated, enthusiastic attempt to make it operate in real-time a hubristic misstep? This is like the first of thisismycheese’s three thoughts on ong, seen as a bad thing. Maybe we've misdiagnosed, and the medicine is doing more harm than good. Maybe that's the only way for the pharmakon to operate. Maybe I've been watching too much House. No matter what, I kind of like the image of our new technology as some Frankenstein's monster of linked-together dead things, shot through with electricity and doomed to wander around in cross-eyed self-contemplation. Pretty soon the blogosphere's going to demand a girlfriend. Actually, it’ll just go on MySpace.